fruit

I planted our Ichi Ki Kei Jiro persimmon tree back in 2008. In its third year, it produced a few fruits that dropped before ripening. In the fourth year, the tree produced fruits that stayed on the tree and ripened there for us to harvest. The little tree has produced mature fruit every year since then.

How to Eat Ichi Ki Kei Jiro Fruits

The flavor of Ichi Ki Kei Jiro persimmons is similar in flavor to that of American persimmons, a less-strong version of that flavor, but the fruit is larger. Even better, unlike American persimmons, Ichi Ki Kei Jiro fruits totally lack that persimmon-astringency, even when the fruits are hard.

After decades of eating American persimmons, sometimes too soon, so that I got that “Sahara Desert” feeling in my mouth, it took a few years to trust that my Asian persimmons would not have that astringency.

The first year we harvested the large, orange fruits from our Ichi Ki Kei Jiro tree, I did eat a few that were still firm, like apples, because everything I had read about this persimmon variety said that I should. The flavor was good, and the fruits were sweet. However, the fruits continued to ripen indoors, and waiting for the fruit to get mushy-soft turned out to be the best plan.

When the fruits are mushy-soft, the flavor is more pronounced, and the sweetness is just right. To eat Ichi Ki Kei Jiro fresh, we wash the soft fruits and then cut them either in half or in quarters and scoop the pulpy innards out with a spoon. This makes an excellent dessert, without any additions or alterations.

How to eat an Ichi Ki Kei Jiro persimmon

Fruit-preparation is made even easier by the lack of seeds in most fruits from our tree. Every now and then, I will cut into a fruit that contains a few seeds, but that is rare.

In years when we have a super-abundance of these persimmons, I scoop out pulp from some of the fruits into freezer bags, to use in making persimmon bread (and other foods) in later months.

Our tree does seem to alternate bumper-crop years with lower-harvest years. The fruits taste great in both cases, but in lower-harvest years we have less.

Last year we had a huge crop, enough to put several quarts of pulp into the freezer and to share bags of fruit with neighbors and friends. This is a lower harvest year. We’ve shared some fruit with friends, but there might not be much persimmon bread this year.

Ichi Ki Kei Jiro: About the Trees

Ichi Ki Kei Jiro is self-fertile, which means that one tree is enough. It doesn’t need to be planted with a companion-tree to set fruit. For smaller yards, this can be an important feature!

This variety is also one of the smaller Asian persimmon trees; Ichi Ki Kei Jiro is supposed to reach a height of about 8-10 feet. Ours is a little taller. It might be as much as 12 feet tall, but my experience is that plants in the South almost always grow taller than expected.

Ichi Ki Kei Jiro fruits on my tree.

Asian persimmons generally are not as cold-hardy as our native, American persimmons. The website for the plant provider Edible Landscaping (where I bought my tree — but this is not a sponsored post!) shows a hardiness range of zones 6-8 for many of the Asian persimmons it offers. My yard is in hardiness zone 7b.

UGA Extension, in its Home Garden Persimmons publication, offers a more conservative guide to cold-hardiness, suggesting that Asian persimmons might not be reliably hardy anywhere north of Macon. I live a couple-hours drive north of Macon, and my tree has survived for 10 years, but other gardeners this far north may have a different experience.

I have read that the lifespan of this tree is about 10 years, which is its current age in my yard. It will be interesting to see how the tree does in the coming year!

Ichi Ki Kei Jiro: Planting and Care

As for most fruiting trees, the site selected for the tree should have plenty of sun.

Our Ichi Ki Kei Jiro is a grafted tree; the Asian persimmon top is grafted onto the roots of an American persimmon. The American persimmon rootstock increases the hardiness of the Asian persimmon, especially its tolerance for drought and for excess water. Here in the Southeastern U.S., we get both of those conditions. Most importantly, though, the tree should not be planted in a spot that stays wet.

The best soil for an Ichi Ki Kei Jiro, like for most other plants, is a soil that we don’t have — a “fertile, sandy loam” that is well-drained, a kind of soil that is almost mythological for those of us in the Southeast.

Soil in my yard is pretty much all red clay. It stays wet for a very long time after a stretch of rainy weather, and then changes over to a brick-like hardness in drier weather.

When I planted my tree, my biggest concern was the risk of soggy soil that could encourage root rots and crown rots. I have lost other trees to soggy soils. To minimize the risk, I planted my Ichi Ki Kei Jiro on a little rise that prevents water from gathering/standing near the trunk/crown of the tree. This strategy seems to have worked.

Care must be taken when transplanting a persimmon tree because of its fragile root system. In general, trees should be planted at the same depth (or no more than 1 inch below) they grew in the nursery. The root system must never be subjected to freezing or drying conditions. To ensure good root growth after planting, water the trees immediately after setting them out and on a weekly basis thereafter if they receive no rainfall.

If your soil is mostly clay, like mine, planting at the same depth or higher, and on a little rise, would probably be better than planting even a smidge below the depth of the plant in the nursery.

I have read that overdoing the fertilizer can result in fruit drop. With our clay soils, I tend to under-fertilize, because I know that clay soil can hold onto the nutrients in fertilizers (of all kinds — organic and conventional) for a long time.

Pruning an Ichi Ki Kei Jiro Persimmon Tree

The roots of grafted persimmon trees tend to send up “suckers” — little saplings of American persimmons — that need to be pruned away at ground-level.

Most of my readers are organic gardeners, but not all are, so this is for all those who sometimes do their weeding with chemicals: Do Not Spray these suckers with herbicides to get rid of them. They are still connected to the Asian persimmon through the root system. Herbicides like RoundUp used on the suckers will travel through the connected root system to your cherished Asian persimmon tree. This could kill the tree. Just so you know…

I prune the top part of my little tree in late winter, usually in early March, but the pruning is minimal. This is not like the pruning required to maintain a healthy apple or peach tree.

I remove low branches that get in the way of mowing and branches that are growing back toward the center of the tree. I look for branches that criss-cross each other and rub together (the rubbing could create a wound in the branch), and prune away one of the two branches. I look for places where several branches grow in a cluster from the same node and prune to reduce the number to just 2 or 3, rather than 4 or 5.

The branches I see on my tree now, in late November, are not where the fruit will form next year. Fruits form on new wood that grows in Spring; the little bit of pruning in March can stimulate growth of that new wood.

Harvesting Ichi Ki Kei Jiro Fruits

Ichi Ki Kei Jiro fruits after harvest. You can see a bit of twig is still attached to each one.

Ichi Ki Kei Jiro trees hold tightly to their fruits. Just pulling to remove the fruit, even fruit that is dark orange and beginning to soften, isn’t always sufficient. To avoid damaging the tree, use pruners to clip right through the twigs or slender branches holding the fruits.

Those fruiting twigs will not produce fruit next year, but they may be a source of new wood for next year’s fruit. When you cut through a twig to harvest fruit, try to cut just beyond an outward-facing bud, to help guide new growth in Spring.

Report on Other Asian Persimmon Trees Nearby

Unknown variety of Asian persimmon growing about a mile and a half from my yard.

Tree 1: One of my friends has a different Asian persimmon tree — I don’t know which variety — that he planted five years ago. His tree still has not produced mature fruit.

Tree 2: When Joe and I walked a different route through the neighborhood yesterday, to get a cup of coffee at a new coffee shop in town (two miles away), we passed a yard that had a very small Asian persimmon tree with fruit. This must be its first year for fruit, because there were just five fruits on the tree, and the tree couldn’t have been more than five or six feet tall. I don’t know which variety of persimmon this tree is, but the fruits are more elongated (cone-shaped) than fruits on my Ichi Ki Kei Jiro.

I hope this information is helpful to gardeners considering which fruits to plant in a Southern yard. If it is, please remember to “like” or “share” the post!

We began eating ripe fruit from the yard a few weeks ago, and the future of fruit in the yard looks promising. Several kinds of fruiting plants are in flower, and others are loaded with unripe fruits that will be ready to eat soon. The sequence of ripening fruit in my Southern yard begins with strawberries.

Strawberries ripen first in my Southern yard

We grow a June-bearing type of strawberry, called ‘Chandler’, instead of an ever-bearing type. Even though the “June” part seems wrong (most of them ripen in May in our yard), this type of strawberry produces all its berries within 5-6 weeks in spring. Ever-bearing types produce berries all summer long.

We’ve been eating strawberries from the yard for a few weeks. PHOTO/Amygwh

In general, strawberries are a low-maintenance home-garden fruit for the South.

With our June-bearing ‘Chandler’, we can harvest and eat-or-preserve the whole crop in a short time-frame. After harvesting the last ripe berries, I can take the bird-netting off the strawberry patch, renovate the bed (see UGA’s Home Garden Strawberries for guidance), and then leave the patch mostly on its own for the rest of the summer.

This feels like a win-win to me. We harvest in early spring when other fruits are not yet ready, and we do most of the work in one big burst after the fruiting is done for the season.

Mulberries are second in our sequence of ripening fruit

A great feature of our mulberry tree is that the birds planted it for us. We didn’t have to dig a hole in the hard red clay or worry about keeping a new tree watered in the first couple of years after planting! If the birds don’t plant mulberry trees in your yard, to come up wild like ours, you can also buy trees to plant. Then, of course, you have to dig the hole and remember to provide water.

Mulberries will be ripe in another week or two. PHOTO/Amygwh

Even better than a “volunteer” fruit tree is one that needs zero maintenance, as long as it stays in-bounds. Our first little tree came up too close to a pathway, and we prune it every year to keep it out of the way. Otherwise, there is no work involved in keeping this tree.

Eventually, another mulberry tree came up in a much better spot, several feet away. These both bear fruit now, but it took a few years for them to be mature enough. The location is fairly shaded; if the trees had more sunlight they would produce more fruit, but what we get makes me happy.

Not everyone loves mulberries, I know. Dealing with the stems can be tricky. Also, birds can make a huge mess after eating the fruits.

Mulberries, though, are a fruit from my childhood. When I harvest and eat mulberries, I am a kid again. Also, they are very good in pies.

The mulberries here are larger than the ones I picked in Oklahoma, but the flavor is just like I remember.

Plums and blueberries are tied for third in the sequence of ripening fruit

Beginning in mid-to-late June, plums and rabbit-eye blueberries (the earliest varieties) begin to ripen. These are the feast days for fruit lovers! The mixed harvest continues until mid-July.

Blueberries will be ripe beginning in mid-to-late June.

Home gardeners usually do not need to spray their blueberry bushes with any kind of pest control products or disease control products, because the plants are hardy in the upper South. They do need acidic soil, though.

The bushes benefit from some pruning as they age, and some fertilizer to keep the berries coming. Caterpillars attack one of my blueberry bushes each year — just that one bush, not any of the others. Every year when I see the caterpillars in late summer, I prune out the branches they are congregated on to remove from the yard. That is not a hard chore, just a weird one.

Clemson University’s fact sheet on planting and maintenance of home garden blueberries contains complete information about choosing, planting, and maintaining blueberries in the South.

Plums in May, not ripe yet.

Our plum tree is still a young tree; this is its second year of fruiting. It is the variety AU Rubrum, developed through Auburn University. Right now, its green fruits are nearly full sized, which makes me think they will begin to ripen soon.

The tree would produce more fruit if it were planted in a location that has more direct sunlight, but our yard, like many in North Georgia, contains some very tall trees. So do our neighbors’ yards. In the hot summertime, the shade from all those trees helps keep the neighborhood cool. However, when we are looking for places to plant sun-loving crops, the shade can be a problem.

Blackberries and raspberries are also tied for third place in the sequence

Our sequence of ripening fruits includes ‘Heritage’ red raspberry canes, planted in the shadier backyard, that tolerate more shade than most fruits. We planted blackberries in a sunny part of the side-yard. Cultivated blackberries do not tolerate shade very well. A few canes of black raspberry are near the blackberries. We also have some wineberries, an invasive species of berry, in the side yard. These can take some shade, so they are behind the blackberries, where the sunlight is more limited. All of these bramble-fruits are delicious!

More fruits will come ripe as the season rolls along, with grapes, paw paws, and persimmons. These are all good. In addition, because we can’t plant as much fruit as we would prefer, we usually supplement what grows in the yard with fruit from our local parks. We rarely see anyone else picking the wild blackberries, muscadines, and persimmons that grow there.

The flowers pictured above were on a peach tree at the community garden on the grounds of a church in Marietta. I took the picture a couple of weeks ago, at the very end of February.

On warm-enough days, I sometimes take my lunch to eat at a picnic table by that garden. It isn’t too far from the office, and it is a beautiful place.

These flowers are beautiful, too, but I was not as happy to see them as I might have been in another spring.

The problem is that the flowers opened too soon, triggered, I would guess, by a February that felt a lot like April. Unfortunately, we are about to have two nights in a row of temperatures around 25 degrees F.

Even though bees and other tiny insects buzzed all around the open flowers, working their pollinator magic, the little fruits forming as a result of that work are at a high risk of damage from the impending cold. Apple and plum trees in my neighborhood have done the same thing, blooming too soon.

This is one of those times when I think of the poet Countee Cullen, and his poem that starts “I cannot hold my peace, John Keats; There never was a spring like this.” Of course, he meant it differently, but this definitely is a spring that I have not seen before.

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